The aim of this article is to describe the significance and key challenges of philosophy for managers as perceived on the basis of a particular understanding of philosophy and my personal experience as a practitioner.The paper will be more visionary than argumentative. I recognise there are important alternative approaches but I will not engage in detailed analysis of them.2Drawing heavily on my own experience, the paper will present an outline and meta-philosophy of philosophical practices that have proven useful in actual (...) interface with practising managers. (shrink)

Arne Naess has come under many influences, most notably Gandhi and Spinoza. The Buddhist influence on his work, though less pervasive, provides the most direct account of key deep ecological concepts such as Self?realization and intrinsic value. I read Ecosophy T as a rigorously phenomenological branch of Deep Ecology. like early Buddhism, Naess responds to the human suffering that causes environmental destruction by challenging us to return to the reality of lived experience. This Buddhist reading clarifies, but it also complicates. (...) It reaffirms Naess's essential vision, but it challenges him at two points: first, to affirm that Self?realization is a process of co?realization with all beings, not just with sentient beings. Second, while this reading accepts that humans do not create the value of nature, it questions whether its value is best expressed in terms of the ?intrinsic value? of radical environmental ethicists. (shrink)

A typical guiding principle of an account of truth is: “truth is objective,” or, to be clear, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how someone or some community believes it to be. Accordingly, whenever a claim is objectively true, its truth conditions ought not depend upon the context in which it is uttered or the utterer making the claim. Part of our ongoing empirical studies surveying people’s responses to (...) questions about truth involved prompts on objectivity. Our studies suggest the following: overall, individuals tend to endorse claims that are consistent with the objectivity of truth; not all conceptions of objectivity are equal, even people who endorse the objectivity of truth sometimes assent to one form of truth’s objectivity over other forms; philosophers and non-philosophers both endorse the objectivity of truth, but the apparent commitment of philosophers is stronger. (shrink)

: This essay examines the content and significance of the notion of "identification" as it appears in the works of theorists of deep ecology. It starts with the most frequently expressed conception of identification—termed "identification-as-belonging"—and distinguishes several different variants of it. After reviewing two criticisms of deep ecology that appear to target this notion, it is argued that there is a second, less frequently noticed type of identification that appears primarily in the work of Arne Naess—"identification-as-kinship." Following this analysis, it (...) is suggested that identification-as-kinship may be less vulnerable to the criticisms that are aimed at identification-as-belonging. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Arne Naess's work in the philosophy of language, which he began in the mid-1930s and continued into the 1960s. This aspect of his work is nowadays relatively neglected, but it deserves to be revisited. Firstly, it is intrinsically interesting to the history of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, because Naess questioned some of the established philosophical methodologies and assumptions of his day. Secondly, it suggests a compelling but unacknowledged intellectual pedigree for some recent developments (...) in linguistics. Naess's philosophy of language developed from his reaction against logical positivism, in particular against what he saw as its unempirical assumptions about language. He went on to establish ?empirical semantics?, in which the study of language was based on real-life linguistic data, drawn primarily from questionnaires issued to philosophically naïve subjects. He also experimented with methods for ?occurrence analysis?, but concluded that the collection and analysis of sufficiently large bodies of naturally-occurring data was impractical. Empirical semantics was not well received by Naess's philosophical contemporaries. It was also seen as being at odds with contemporary trends in linguistics. However, some present-day branches of linguistics have striking resonances with Naess's work from as much as seventy years ago. In sociolinguistics, questionnaires have become an established means of collecting linguistic data. In corpus linguistics, advances in technology have made Naess's unobtainable ideal of ?occurrence analysis? a viable methodology. Some of the principal conclusions reached as a result of this methodology are strikingly similar to Naess's own findings. (shrink)

In the present essay, I aim to accentuate an analogy between the patterns of thought articulated by Berkeley's Hylas and those of Nagel in his philosophy of bats and aliens. The comparison has a critical purpose, with Philonous playing a role similar to that of Wittgenstein. I argue that Nagel's central claim comes down to statements that are marked by a peculiar form of emptiness. Towards the end, though, I will concede that this kind of Wittgensteinian criticism runs up against (...) certain limits. The fantasies produced by Hylas or Nagel have as counterparts genuine philosophical expressions of experience, which are not vulnerable to the charges levelled at their theoretical parallels. (shrink)

The etymological origin of ecology in the human house is the point of departure of this article. It argues that oikos is not merely a vague metaphor for ecology, but that built households provide a key to understanding the household of nature. Three households support this claim: the cabins of Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Arne Noess. The article suggests that their views on the household of nature stand in direct relationship with their respective homes. They also have a distant (...) epistemological bird's-eye view of nature seen from homes which were located - symbolically or in reality - on a mountain top. (shrink)